Within two weeks of getting in touch with Leapfrog Ventures, the duo of Moses Korir and Felix Cheruiyot was able to rope in the Japan-based investor with a USD 50 k funding. This is the second investment made by Leapfrog Ventures within a month.

In a conversation with WeeTracker, Takuma Terakubo, CEO of Leapfrog Ventures, said, “We want to make seed stage investments in about a hundred startups in the next three years, and foster business alliances with Japanese companies wherever we find tech synergies.”

According to Moses who is the CEO of Biashara Bot, “this round of funding from Leapfrog would help us to work on further product improvement such as adding plugins for major e-commerce sites like Shopify, WooCommerce as well as Magento.” According to the startup, they would also be able to deepen their service availability in Kenya before expanding to key African markets such as Nigeria and South Africa.

Biashara bot’s name is taken after the Swahili word ‘biashara’ which means business. With the advent of e-commerce, hundreds of local businesses have set up both websites as well as social media business accounts, especially on Facebook. However, managing multiple conversations with customers who require instant answers has remained a considerable challenge. Customers are left hanging or responded to much later than they would have wanted.

Learning from real-life scenarios where companies would either get overwhelmed or would be unable to answer all the questions that arise when a visitor is on their online channels. This the problem the startup is trying to solve. When handled poorly, customers would not be able to complete their transactions or get sufficient support to make a purchasing decision. Since different customers could ask similar questions, it means that artificial intelligence could be used to anticipate what they would ask and what suitable answers would need to be given.

Having known each other for over 17 years, Moses and Felix, founders of Biashara Bot, developed an automated software solution that comes alive whenever a customer visits any website or facebook site to make a purchase. This bot is provided as SAAS – software as a service.

Takuma Terakubo, Leapfrog Ventures

They initially set up Biashara Viral Gains Limited which is what they used to assist various companies with their IT-related challenges soon after graduating from university. Moses studied Actuarial Science at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology while Felix acquired a degree in Computer Science from Kenyatta University.

Biashara bot has features that enhance seamless interaction from handling customer queries to receiving orders as well as managing delivery details. The solution already handles the local popular mobile payment Mpesa. It has been facilitating merchants to deliver ordered goods to customers.

Launched in July 2018, this Japanese VC is looking to invest in the range of USD 30-50K, with focus sectors as Fintech, HealthTech, Logistics, Agriculture, and Energy startups.